Posts From USA

Today we said goodbye to our Azerbaijani guide and driver and ventured into Georgia; and I am pleased to report that the border experience was simple and fast - thankfully. Inside Georgia our first stop was the village of Telavi where we learned about the making of bread and a style of desert called churchkhela. The significant thing about the bread is the style of the oven in which it is baked. It is round, almost a cylinder, standing with an opening at the top and a fire at the bottom. It's a bit like a large Indian Tandoori. The dough to be backed is stuck to the internal side of the cylinder. Some of the photos will explain better than my words can.

There is not much to say about today as it turned out to be simply a travel day in which we would drive from Telavi to Tbilisi. Before getting underway Nina went on a bit of a photo expedition around our hotel and captured images of the old fort across the road as well as some of the well-worn infrastructure of the city. There after the group did a quick tour of the local market before we undertook the 4-5 hour drive to Tbilisi. For reasons that I could never work out our driver took a very indirect route between Telavi and Tbilisi.

Today was always planned to be a long driving day as we were to travel the Georgian Military Road north from Tbilisi to almost the Russian border. Although the drive was under 200km in each direction, the round trip took just on 12 hours and along the way we saw

We spent most of yesterday (Sept 20th) in Yerevan with a late checkout before catching another overnight train. This one would take us back into Georgia, through Tbilisi and onto the Black Sea resort town of Batumi. The border crossing back into Georgia hapened around 22:00 and between Armenian exit processing and Georgia entry took a couple of hours and was all done either with officers boarding the train or at a small office beside the train.